The first comprehensive review of all extant Italian chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes Filipino Otherness with the unique condition of Italian ambivalence and alterity within Europe.
The first comprehensive review of all extant Italian chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes Filipino Otherness with the unique condition of Italian ambivalence and alterity within Europe.
This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest.
Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about ones travels in instances of national character building (in Italys case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippine case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification Italian travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole-periphery relations.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The place of ("Italian") travel writing in the colonial project
2. The place of travel writing in the mapping of national discourse
3. The "Italian" chroniclers motives for travel
4. The "Italian" chronicles journey towards publication
5. The "Filipino" native according to the "Italian" chronicler
Conclusion
Index
Jillian Loise Melchor is Assistant Professor and Italian Section Coordinator of the Department of European Languages of the University of the Philippines Diliman. She was a former faculty member of the Division of Humanities of UP Visayas where she taught Spanish, literary translation, and cultural studies. Her masters degree in multilingual cultural studies was funded by the Erasmus Mundus academic council and was obtained from the Universities of Sheffield (UK), Bergamo (Italy), and Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She is currently doing her doctoral research on the decolonisation of creole language heritage as an EDUFI (Finnish National Agency for Education) fellow at the University of Helsinki's Department of Languages. She is a published literary translator and has international, peer-reviewed publications examining the link between language and power in fields such as multilingual heritage, language education policy, and postcolonial linguistics.
